Hi Doug,

> As for priorities for playlists, I assume that this would allow managers
> to automatically determine which playlist would get played in the event
> of a scheduling conflict. This could be very useful, especially in cases
> where multiple users are submitting playlists for scheduling.

Wouldn't it be simpler to operate on a 'first come, first served' basis
for time slots? In that case, the manager should be able to resolve any
scheduling conflict using the Campcaster Web interface.

I would suggest that users in the 'admins' group be allowed to move or
remove other user's playlists from the schedule, but ordinary users
should not be able to tamper with each other's scheduling. In a priority
model, everyone would set their own playlist to the highest priority!

A further refinement would be to set time slots to 'belong' to specific
users. For example, the ordinary user 'dave' can schedule anything he
likes between 10pm and 12pm each weekday, because that's his regular
show. Dave cannot re-arrange the breakfast show, because that's nothing
to do with him, and he's not the station manager.

Cheers!

Daniel

Hi Vlad,

> Let's
> imagine that we have a music playlist (lowest priority) beginning at
> 10-00, and news playlist beginning at 10-15 with higher priority, then
> the scheduler will automatically add at 10-15 news, and then (after
> news)return to the music playlist. You don't need to keep in mind that
> at 10-45 you should start adverts or calculate a song after which
> adverts should start...

It's an interesting idea, but I can forsee some potential problems.

Let's say that the music playlist is exactly one hour long because
there's a weather report scheduled for 11:00:00 (hours/minutes/seconds).
At 10:15:00 when the news starts, the music playlist might be half-way
through a song. That's going to sound bad, even if we fade out the music
(we should only do this for emergency announcements, not the regular news).

At 10:45:00 when the news ends, we could start the music half-way
through another song. Or we could start at the beginning of the next
song, but cut off half of the last song - both options are bad.

The better way to handle this is with nested playlists. Create a news
playlist with intro and outro jingles exactly 30 minutes long, then nest
this playlist inside the 30 minute music show playlist. The music
playlist will now be 1 hour long. To create a playlist of an exact
length, choose your last song based on its duration. One minute and
fifty seconds is just long enough to play a Ramones track :-)

This reminds me that in the auto playlist generator, which is a planned
feature, we should enable the user to generate a playlist of an exact
duration. In your example, we could ask Campcaster to create a playlist
of music and jingles that was exactly 15 minutes long before the news,
and 15 minutes of music after. Then nest all three playlists inside a 1
hour playlist, and schedule that.

Cheers!

Daniel

Daniel James wrote on Fri, 01 October 2010 10:37

Hi Vlad,


It's an interesting idea, but I can forsee some potential problems.

Let's say that the music playlist is exactly one hour long because
there's a weather report scheduled for 11:00:00 (hours/minutes/seconds).
At 10:15:00 when the news starts, the music playlist might be half-way
through a song. That's going to sound bad, even if we fade out the music
(we should only do this for emergency announcements, not the regular news).

At 10:45:00 when the news ends, we could start the music half-way
through another song. Or we could start at the beginning of the next
song, but cut off half of the last song - both options are bad.

The better way to handle this is with nested playlists. Create a news
playlist with intro and outro jingles exactly 30 minutes long, then nest
this playlist inside the 30 minute music show playlist. The music
playlist will now be 1 hour long. To create a playlist of an exact
length, choose your last song based on its duration. One minute and
fifty seconds is just long enough to play a Ramones track

This reminds me that in the auto playlist generator, which is a planned
feature, we should enable the user to generate a playlist of an exact
duration. In your example, we could ask Campcaster to create a playlist
of music and jingles that was exactly 15 minutes long before the news,
and 15 minutes of music after. Then nest all three playlists inside a 1
hour playlist, and schedule that.

Cheers!

Daniel

Hi Daniel.

It is not exactly what I meant. No need to interrupt the song by news, you can run the news after the current song. And better to have two modes: 1)interrupt the current song 2)start a new playlist after the current song. Or any other file of course (break or start ). First mode you can use in emergency, the other one in normal way.
In this case in normal way after news will start the next song. I think it is possidle to organise, because each song is a separate file.

Vlad.

Hi Daniel.

You are right. But if it's important for us to stream shared on some precise time intervals, such as one hour, half an hour, or otherwise, the sum of all the playlists should be equal to the selected time segment. The segment is a container with a few playlists inside. So we need customize the end of last one to fit the container, but inside container there will be nothing to fit. This is what I mean. The ability to assign priorities to playlists do not preclude the use of the current approach to the creation of the schedule. It simply adds new features. Someone will take advantage of them, some do not.


Vlad.